lensbased.net

HELLO EVERYONE!
new dates for class meets and tutorials are online. pls sign up for elevator witches, 28.4!here´s quick run through.
14.4 info meet, R115, 2pm
soft drinks served by Gago
28.4 Elevator Witch
7.5 class trip to Bremen
14-18.5 Venice
29-31.5 London ICA FOMO
beginning June show with Clemens class in Leipzig.
15th June RCPP workshop with Wendy Chun!
27.+28.6 RCPP workshop Paul Feigelfeld!

loads more seminars and workshops by RCPP to be added very soon, precise dates upcoming.
looking forward  to be back!
 

GREAT EVENT ORGANISED BY Daniel Franke, Sandra Moskova, Azin Feizabadi
 
Talks by:
Cramer Florian, Willem de Kooning Academy/Hogeschool Rotterdam
Paul Feigelfeld, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg
Between techno-positivism, culture-pessimism and post-apocalyptic, “Post-digital […] sucks […]”, cut off its original context, emerges out of a desire to dig in a mess of linguistic misunderstandings with Florian Cramer and a “Cryptologocentrism”, where “post-digital” is Internet coming past its teenage years – with Paul Feigelfeld.
According to Cramer, it is an objective fact that the contemporary popular mass culture we live in is not a post-digital one. Yet, “post-digital” is a broadly featured term within it. This theoretical input aims to “cut through the mess” of how and why “post”, “media” and “digital” are called the way they are called in arts, communication theory and in contemporary popular mass culture, one that emerged and developed entirely on the Internet.
initiated by:
Daniel Franke, Sandra Moskova, Azin Feizabadi
lensbased Class Hito Steyerl, Universität der Künste Berlin
Graduiertenschule der UdK
Address:
Universität der Künste Berlin
Hardenbergstraße 33
Room 110April 10

Hello class.
 
class meeting and seminar are switched for next week. class meeting is 11.2 10am and seminar 10.2 normal time both in R115.
Also this week the amazing Tiziana Terranova on 4.2 and 5.2 respectively!

happy new year!
next week class meet 10 Am, not 2pm on Tu 13th. Seven presentations.
Also announcing first workshops in the scope of omeder research project.
LOOKING FOR PERSON ABLE TO DEVELOP SIMPLE SMARTPHONE APP FOR REFUGEE PROJECT!
Politics of Digital Networks Workshop Marathon! JAN/FEB 2015:
30.1, 11:00 AM, 115 Contra-internet workshop with Zach Blas
Contra-internet describes the emerging artistic militancies and political subversions of neoliberal, networked digital technologies. Recognizing the internet as a premier arena of control today, contra-internet is both a refusal of, or exodus from, the internet and also an attempt to build aesthetico-political alternatives to its infrastructures. Aspects of the contra-internet include the global proliferation of autonomous networks and development of encryption tactics.
Poised against the ever popular term “post-internet,” contra-internet is a conceptual, practical, and experimental framework for uniting explicitly political positions that understand internet technologies as bound to mechanisms that vehemently police and criminalize populations—biometric regulation, drone attacks, and data surveillance, to name but a few.
Inspired by Beatriz Preciado’s Manifesto contrasexual, contra-internet is feminist, queer, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist, addressing how non-normative, minoritarian persons are violently impacted by neoliberal network technologies.
Contra-internet practices involve:

• An implicit critique of the internet as a neoliberal agent and conduit for labour exploitation, financial violence, and precarity.
• An intersectional analysis that highlights the internet’s intimate connections to the propagation of ableism, classism, homophobia, sexism, racism, and transphobia.
• A refusal of the brute quantification and standardization that digital technologies enforce as an interpretative lens for evaluating and understanding life.
• A radicalization of technics, which is at once the acknowledgement of the impossibility of a totalized technical objectivity and also the generation of different logics and possibilities for technological functionality.
• A transformation of network-centric subjectivity beyond and against the internet as a rapidly developing zone of work-leisure indistinction, social media monoculture, and the addiction of staying connected.
• Constituting alternatives to the internet, which is nothing short of utopian.

Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose work engages technology, queerness, and politics. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo.
Blas has exhibited and lectured internationally, most recently at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; the 2014 Museum of Arts and Design Biennial, New York; the 2014 Dakar Bienniale; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Queer/Art/Film LA, Los Angeles; quartier21 / MuseumsQuartier Wien; Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; transmediale, Berlin; and Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool. In 2012 – 13, he was an artist/researcher-in-residence at the b.a.n.g.lab and Performative Nanorobotics Lab, University of California, San Diego. In 2013-14, Blas was a resident at Eyebeam in New York City, The White Building in London, and The Moving Museum in Istanbul.
reading list:
Beatriz Preciado’s Contra-sexual Contract (Sample) http://totalartjournal.com/archives/1402/the-contra-sexual-manifesto/
Contra-Internet Aesthetics by Zach is available from Boaz and Max.
Screening Louis Henderson – 30.January.15
Later that evening we’ll host Louis Henderson for a screening his most recent film All That is Solid. The screening will be followed by a a discussion. (Exact time tba)
ALL THAT IS SOLID (2014) HD 15’26”
Produced for the 59th Salon de Montrouge – Paris – with support from Ekimetrics. Featuring music by Joseph Munday and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
This is a film that takes place. In between a hard place, a hard drive, and an imaginary, a soft space – the cloud that holds my data. And in the soft grey matter, Contained within the head.
As technological progress pushes forward in the west, enormous piles of obsolete computers are thrown away and recycled. Pushed out of sight and sent to the coast of West Africa these computers end up in waste grounds such as Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. On arrival the e-waste is recuperated by young men, who break and burn the plastic casings in order to extract the precious metals contained within. Eventually the metals are sold, melted and reformed into new objects to be sold – it is a strange system of recycling, a kind of reverse neocolonial mining, whereby the African is searching for mineral resources in the materials of Europe. Through showing these heavy processes, the video highlights the importance of dispelling the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology to reveal the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins. Trailer: https://vimeo.com/102666180
Tiziana Terranova Workshop (2days!) – 3.- 4.February.15
3.4 11:00-16:00 , 4.3 11:00 – 15:00
This two-day workshop aims at critically exploring the topos of the network as the image of nodes and links remains the invariant topological constant of data visualisation in a disparate number of domains. In particular, the notion of ‘social network’ will be looked at by discussing the development of social network analysis and graph theory through a genealogy of dispositifs of security or control. Alternative ways of thinking about the nature of the social relation diagrammed by graph theory will be explored, as well as the notion of the aesthetic and cultural ‘experience of networking’.
Tiziana Terranova lectures and research the digital media cultures and politics in the Department of Human and Social Sciences, at the University of Naples, ‘L’Orientale’. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press 2004) and Hypersocial (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). She is a member of the free university network Euronomade and of the Robin Hood Minor Asset Management Cooperative.
For reading list see wiki

14.10 2pm it is. Hope everyone returns sound and safe.
Sign up for 5min presentations on first day. Also scroll down below to find the Mrs. Hayastan Shakarian celebration festivities currently happening in Tblisi.
Here is the schedule for Ana´s fantastic seminar, run every Wed from 22.10 in R115.
Seminar: Things that Talk* – Media, gender and fiction in contemporary art
Every Wed after 22.10 at  2pm, R115
The present seminar will examine the impact of the second industrial revolution on art and aesthetics, through the vantage point of science and horror fiction.
Amongst the topics addressed will be:
–The relation between art and media: does the technical take precedence over the social?
–The concept and genealogy of techno-utopia.
–Science fiction as an expression of the political unconscious.
–Automation, animation and animism.
–Fictional types and tropes, gendered concepts and political subjects.
 
The class will read assigned chapters from selected novels and watch films and other visual materials as well as discuss several theoretical texts and their core concepts. The goal is to achieve a lively discussion thus attendance and participation are encouraged, there will be no attendance taken however and there is no punishment for absentees.
 
Evaluation– students can choose one of the following:
 
–Writing a take-home essay of 3 to 4 pages. Essays need to reflect the topics approached in the seminar and proposals need to be previously discussed and approved. Off-topic essays will not be accepted.
–Oral presentation in front of class, 15 to 20 min. Same as above.
–Taking a final exam.
 
 
Preliminary Bibliography:
-Barbrook, Richard and Cameron, Andy The Californian Ideology, Mute, Issue n° 3, Autumn 1995
-Hayles, N. Catherine How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
-Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto – Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature New York; Routledge, (1991), pp.149-181.
-Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, The MIT Press (2006)
-Galison, Peter The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), 228-266.
-Shaviro, Stephen, Post Cinematic Affect, Zero Books (2010)
https://www.facebook.com/events/563829203721829/?fref=ts

We are getting close to the new term.
Dont forget to sign up for elevator bitches on 16.10. The class trip to Georgia is ON! see below. There will be two seminars led by Boaz and Max in the scope of new research project. Details to follow as they emerge from the grey dust of bureaucracy. Also, any news on your Rotterdam class-in-exile plan?
In the meantime some information for you from your personal tutor:
Dear Fellow lensbasers
Here I am sending the trip schedule for Georgia
1.10  – arrival day /two people Max & Bruno are arriving on 4.10 – Neda, Pauline and Lennart are arriving on 28.09/
at the airport we have to divide the group. One part of the group will stay at my place and another part will go to Tekla’s father’s studio. If there will not be enough place, Dadu can also take few people with her.
2.10  – we are all invited by Jesse Takeshi and Elene to their project opening in Batumi /very lovely city in the west coast of Georgia/
If u would like to go there I would suggest to take a night train on 1.10,  we will arrive there on 2.10 early morning, spend two days over there and then we can go straight to the village from there.  /No free accommodation in Batumi/ please text me back, i need to know how many of u want to go there.
4.10   – we are going to Racha /small village called “I Tola” in the south Caucasus/ where we gonna spend 3 days.
in case if we all go to Racha straight from Batumi Dadu is gonna pick Max and Bruno in Tbilisi and they will join us in the village.
there are some activities being planed in  Racha as well. Josh and Elene are going to curate each nights. so there is one slot left, any volunteers?
7.10  – we are back in Tbilisi.
8.10   – Hito arrives in Tbilisi and the same day we all going to visit Ms Shakarian. I still have not found her. Next Tuesday I am in Georgia so I am gonna visit her village and will find her to make an appointment. Hope she is still in a healthy condition and full of energy as we all remember her from the last decade.
9.10  – we gonna have lecture-performances and video screenings in the Literature Museum in Tbilisi. After the midnight, 3 people from the group – Max, Mikk and short hear Adrian gonna play for us in one of the nicest nightclub called “Mtkvari” /I am still communicating with the owners of the club, so I will give u some more details bit later/
10-10  – midnight u will leave your miserable and exhausted Georgian friend, which will join u soon in Berlin.
Of course in between those days we gonna meet some locals and visit some nice local gas-stations to degustate Georgian wine .
Here below I am sending the list of the people who already booked the tickets and ones who confirmed that they are coming. Also I would like to announce that the list is closed and if someone wants to come they got to organize their trip by their own. Unless someone already confirmed before and I forgot to insert his/her name in the list.

Today I am celebrating the extraordinary life and work of Harun Farocki.
Take a moment and raise a toast to this wonderful filmmaker, intellectual, pioneer, person.
Towards the end of his life, his works started to smile.
The loss is beyond description.